Stability of neutral stochastic switched time delay systems: An average dwell time approach

This paper considers a class of stochastic systems referred to as stochastic switched systems of neutral type with time‐varying delay, which combines switched systems with neutral stochastic systems. The systems consist of subsystems of two forms: (i) only stable subsystems and (ii) both stable subsystems and unstable subsystems. By establishing an integral inequality, the exponential stability in pth(p≥1)‐moment for such systems with only stable subsystems is first considered. Then, by using an average dwell time approach, the exponential stability in pth(p≥1)‐moment for the second form is addressed. An important finding of this study is that when the average dwell time is chosen to be sufficiently large and the total activation time of unstable subsystems is relatively small compared with that of stable subsystems, the exponential stability in pth(p≥1)‐moment for such systems can be guaranteed. Two major advantages of these new results are that the differentiability or continuity of the delay function is not required compared with the existing results in the literature, and the proposed approaches can be used to consider the case when the neutral item and the stochastic perturbation are simultaneously presented. An example is provided to verify the effectiveness and potential of the theoretic results obtained. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A new generator of causal ideal internal dynamics for a class of unstable linear differential equations

The generator design for causal ideal internal dynamics (IID), namely, solving IID, is a fundamental problem in a nonminimum‐phase output tracking process. In this paper, for a class of unstable matrix differential equations, a new causal IID generator is proposed, whose parameters are partly chosen via optimization. Compared with existing similar design schemes, it is applicable to matrix differential equations with singular system matrices. Also, it requires less computation, avoids taking higher order derivatives, and can be easily extended to treat slowly time‐varying matrix differential equations without the need for extra computation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Global adaptive stabilization for high‐order uncertain time‐varying nonlinear systems with time‐delays

This paper focuses on the adaptive stabilization problem for a class of high‐order nonlinear systems with time‐varying uncertainties and unknown time‐delays. Time‐varying uncertain parameters are compensated by combining a function gain with traditional adaptive technique, and unknown multiple time‐delays are manipulated by the delicate choice of an appropriate Lyapunov function. With the help of homogeneous domination idea and recursive design, a continuous adaptive state‐feedback controller is designed to guarantee that resulting closed‐loop systems are globally uniformly stable and original system states converge to zero. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is illustrated by the stabilization of delayed neural network systems. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reliability and time‐to‐failure bounds for discrete‐time constrained Markov jump linear systems

This paper presents a methodology to obtain a guaranteed‐reliability controller for constrained linear systems, which switch between different modes according to a Markov chain (Markov jump linear systems). Inside the classical maximal robust controllable set, there is 100% guarantee of never violating constraints at future time. However, outside such set, some sequences might make hitting constraints unavoidable for some disturbance realisations. A guaranteed‐reliability controller based on a greedy heuristic approach was proposed in an earlier work for disturbance‐free, robustly stabilisable Markov jump linear systems. Here, extensions are presented by, first, considering bounded disturbances and, second, presenting an iterative algorithm based on dynamic programming. In non‐stabilisable systems, reliability is zero; therefore, prior results cannot be applied; in this case, optimisation of a mean‐time‐to‐failure bound is proposed, via minor algorithm modifications. Optimality can be proved in the disturbance‐free, finitely generated case. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distributed filtering and synchronization of diffusively state‐coupled heterogeneous systems

This paper studies distributed filtering‐based ssynchronization of diffusively state‐coupled heterogeneous systems. For given heterogeneous subsystems and a network topology, sufficient conditions for the filtering‐based synchronization are developed with a guaranteed performance. The estimation and synchronization error dynamics are obtained in a decoupled form, and it is shown that the filter and the controller can be designed separately by LMIs. The feasibility of the proposed design method using LMIs is discussed, and the main results are validated through examples with various setup. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Semi‐global output feedback control for nonlinear systems with uncertain time‐delay and output function

This paper considers semi‐global output feedback control for more general nonlinear systems with unknown time‐delay and output function whose derivative is unbounded from above. By introducing a new observer and using the backstepping design method and the Razumikhin stability theorem, an output feedback controller is constructed to achieve a semi‐global stability. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic output feedback control of saturated switched delay systems under the PDT switching

This paper is devoted to saturated control of switched delay systems. The main focus is to find a suitable switching law and saturated output feedback controllers such that the closed‐loop systems are asymptotically stable and have the disturbance tolerance/rejection capacity. A mixed slow/arbitrary switching approach, so‐called persistent dwell time (PDT) switching, is used to design the switching law. Compared with the slow switching, it is more general and leads to more flexibility in the process of constructing switching signals. More importantly, the proposed PDT is dependent on state delay, which includes the previous delay‐independent PDT. Next, time‐varying ellipsoids and a prescribe l₂‐gain are introduced to characterize the disturbance tolerance and rejection capacities of systems, respectively. Based on the proposed results, the relation between delay‐dependent PDT and level of disturbance tolerance/rejection is shown. Finally, saturated controllers working in time‐varying hull controllable regions are designed. Thus, the considered problem is solved. An example is exploited to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed results. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Flocking of multi‐agent nonholonomic systems with unknown leader dynamics and relative measurements

In this paper, we consider the distributed flocking control problem of multi‐agent nonholonomic systems with a virtual leader whose dynamics is unknown; state information is time varying and not available to all agents under both fixed and switching topologies. On the basis of the relative velocity and orientation information of neighboring agents, two distributed discontinuous control protocols are designed for fixed and switching topologies, respectively. By using tools from algebraic graph theory and nonsmooth analysis, the proposed distributed discontinuous control protocols guarantee that the velocities and orientations of the agents exponentially converge to the velocity and orientation of the virtual leader, respectively, while ensuring collision avoidance of the whole group, if the interaction graph among agents is undirected and the virtual leader with bounded time‐varying velocity has directed paths to other agents. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robust multiscale stereo matching from fundus images with radiometric differences

A robust multiscale stereo matching algorithm is proposed to find reliable correspondences between low contrast and weakly textured retinal image pairs with radiometric differences. Existing algorithms designed to deal with piecewise planar surfaces with distinct features and Lambertian reflectance do not apply in applications such as 3D reconstruction of medical images including stereo retinal images. In this paper, robust pixel feature vectors are formulated to extract discriminative features in the presence of noise in scale space, through which the response of low-frequency mechanisms alter and interact with the response of high-frequency mechanisms. The deep structures of the scene are represented with the evolution of disparity estimates in scale space, which distributes the matching ambiguity along the scale dimension to obtain globally coherent reconstructions. The performance is verified both qualitatively by face validity and quantitatively on our collection of stereo fundus image sets with ground truth, which have been made publicly available as an extension of standard test images for performance evaluation.     

Securing against brute-force attack: A hash-based RFID mutual authentication protocol using a secret value

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID ) system is a contactless automatic identification system using small, low-cost RFID tags. It enables recognition of the tag information via radio frequency communication, by attaching an RFID tag to an animate or inanimate object. Since an RFID system has the advantage of simultaneously recognizing massive amounts of information, it is expected to replace the bar-code system. The most important problem with an RFID system is that an adversary can access the tag information, which gives rise to privacy and forgery problems. This paper presents a hash-based mutual authentication protocol as a solution. The proposed protocol is designed to send a random number generated by a tag to a back-end server without disclosure. Moreover it substitutes a random number with a secret value, which is employed in a response message. The properties of the proposed protocol enable constant creation of distinct response messages without interferences from intended or meaningless requests generated by an adversary, while the secret value is not directly transmitted. Our proposed protocol make is difficult for an attacker to launch successful brute-force attacks against our approach.